AutoFormat.RemoveEmpty
TYPE: bool
VERSION: 3.2.0
DEFAULT: false
--DESCRIPTION--
<p>
When enabled, HTML Purifier will attempt to remove empty elements that
contribute no semantic information to the document. The following types
of nodes will be removed:
</p>
<ul><li>
Tags with no attributes and no content, and that are not empty
elements (remove <code><a></a></code> but not
<code><br /></code>), and
</li>
<li>
Tags with no content, except for:<ul>
<li>The <code>colgroup</code> element, or</li>
<li>
Elements with the <code>id</code> or <code>name</code> attribute,
when those attributes are permitted on those elements.
</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<p>
Please be very careful when using this functionality; while it may not
seem that empty elements contain useful information, they can alter the
layout of a document given appropriate styling. This directive is most
useful when you are processing machine-generated HTML, please avoid using
it on regular user HTML.
</p>
<p>
Elements that contain only whitespace will be treated as empty. Non-breaking
spaces, however, do not count as whitespace. See
%AutoFormat.RemoveEmpty.RemoveNbsp for alternate behavior.
</p>
<p>
This algorithm is not perfect; you may still notice some empty tags,
particularly if a node had elements, but those elements were later removed
because they were not permitted in that context, or tags that, after
being auto-closed by another tag, where empty. This is for safety reasons
to prevent clever code from breaking validation. The general rule of thumb:
if a tag looked empty on the way in, it will get removed; if HTML Purifier
made it empty, it will stay.
</p>
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